Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion

The real Obamacare nightmare

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About this blog

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the
...

Holmes & Co. is a Blog for Independent Minds, a place for a free-flowing discussion of politics, policy, news and opinion.
This blog is the online cousin of the Opinion section of the MetroWest Daily News. As such, our focus starts in the MetroWest/495 area and spreads from there to include Massachusetts, the nation and the world. You'll also find here lots of cross-referencing to columns and editorials in the MetroWest Daily News.

The blog presents an opportunity for readers to comment directly and immediately on pieces that appear on the print pages.

Maybe the rants Rob keeps posting about the Obamacare “trainwreck” lack specifics, not to mention coherence, because that makes them impossible to debunk. Other alleged Obamacare “nightmares,” like the sob stories the Koch brothers are putting in their ads, keep being discounted by fact-checkers.

The trainwreck-nightmare mantra, it appears, will not stand up to scrutiny, not that the Republicans will stop repeating it. The numbers on cost and coverage will firm up over time – the Census, for one, has been tracking the number of uninsured for decades, and their new numbers, assuming the methodology is consistent, should be pretty telling. But the numbers from a study released this week by the Rand Corp. are pretty telling as well: A net of 9.3 million previously uninsured adults have gotten coverage, it finds, since September of last year. And much as Rob keeps telling us that his clients are dropping employer coverage, they are apparently in the minority: Rand found an increase of 8.3 million people covered by employers.

Another finding from Rand that should help ground the discussion: “For most people the ACA has not changed their health insurance coverage. Among adults, 80 percent still had the same form of coverage in March 2014 as in September 2013. Notably, more than 100 million had ESI before and have ESI now, while 26 million remain uninsured.”

And as for the “millions” of people who “lost” their insurance, here’s what Rand found: “Less than one million who previously had individual market insurance transitioned to being uninsured. While we cannot tell if these people lost their insurance due to cancellation or because they simply felt the cost was too high, the overall number represents less than one percent of people between the ages of 18 and 64.”

Krugman nails it today, noting that the real nightmare is what happened to about 5 million low-income Americans unfortunate enough to live in states run by Republican governors who, out of political spite, refused the federally-funded Medicaid expansion (they can also thank John Roberts for that). It’s not just the poor people in their states they are hurting (and killing – one study projects 7,000 to 17,000 deaths a year because of the governors’ actions). They are also shooting their state economies in the foot.

Krugman quotes health policy expert Jonathan Gruber: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.”

Just try to explain these facts to Mitch McConnell, John Boehner or Rob, though. They’ll likely stick their thumbs in their ears and start loudly singing “La-La-La.”